So many times in the history of Mormon polygamy, the outside world thought it had the movement on the ropes only to see it flourish anew.

In keeping with original Mormon teachings, much of the property in Hildale and Colorado City is held in trust for the church. Striving to be as self-sufficient as possible, the community grows a wide variety...

My father suffered from chronic wanderlust. When I was 14, he set out on a yearlong road trip across Europe and Asia – and decided to take me along for company.

Iraq is going to go down as one of the greatest blunders in American history.

The principle of plural marriage was revealed to the Mormons amid much secrecy. Dark clouds hovered over the church in the early 1840s, after rumors spread that its founder, Joseph Smith, had taken up the...

Even if he was happier in Asia than he’d been in Latin America, the wanderlust still worked on my father’s insides like a disease. One of the most recurrent memories of my childhood is of...

The peculiarities of my childhood, of constantly moving through so many different cultures, of always being the outsider, may have made me extraordinarily self-sufficient, but it had also bred a certain detachment, a sense that...

[A] common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades–no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer.

As a journalist, I try to avoid talking to American diplomats, because I am stunned again and again by just how little grasp they have of what people are really feeling in a country. Especially...

History is often the tale of small moments—chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence—that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial...

Just as with homicide, those in the ‘passion’ category of suicide are much more likely to turn to whatever means are immediately available – those that are easy and quick.

The modern Middle East was largely created by the British. It was they who carried the Allied war effort in the region during World War I and who, at its close, principally fashioned its peace....

Waitresses, soldiers, rickshaw drivers, old ladies selling vegetables – my father would schmooze anybody. He was Clintonesque before the word existed. And, of course, it paid dividends. Ill-tempered guards at the most notorious border crossings...

I’d been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.